Seems like this topic has been beat to death from other threads I've found but I just cannot seem to get sound on this darn laptop. According to specs it has the Crystal 4237B chip that I have read so much about. None of the modprobes I've done on it seem to work. I've also tried in a few other distros. Anyone have any secrets with this chip they can share with me?

It appears the CS4237B sound chip can be a real bear as I've seen many many posts about this particular chipset with oss and alsa. For some they use the cs4236 module and for others, the cs4232 works. After much trial and error and banter with JasonW in IRC, I finally have this working in DSL.

Add that info to bootlocal.sh if you want it to load at boot with a frugal install.

I probably would have never gotten this if it wasn't for the fact that the owner of this laptop had a Red Hat 4.3 install on this machine that had working sound. I have some old RH 6 cd's so I loaded it on the lappy and sure enough, sound! When I ran sndconfig, it gave a lot of detail around ports and set up the sound flawlessly. When I grabbed sndconfig from woody to run in DSL, it didn't give as much detail and failed to get sound working!!

So, I looked for the RH equivalent to modules.conf and searched for the sound info. That is where I found the code above. I plugged that into DSL and it came alive!

Very interesting that the same app, sndconfig, performed so much differently in RH as opposed to debian. Maybe it was a version issue. All I know is that the next time I have a real perplexing sound issue on an old machine, I'm gonna do a quick RH6 install!